that Marion Rose could go home. He wanted to be
alone with his loneliness. It seemed to him now that being alone meant
merely peace and contentment. It was people, he told himself finally,
who had brought all this trouble and bitterness into his life.

He wished she would go and leave him alone, but that was manifestly
impossible. Angry and hurt though he was, he could not contemplate the
thought of letting her go down there into that blackened waste with
the thick sprinkling of bonfires where stumps were all ablaze, fallen
tangles of brush were smoldering, and dead trees flared like giant
torches or sent down great blazing branches. She might get through
without disaster, but it would be by a miracle of good luck. Even a
man would hesitate to attempt the feat of working his way across the
burning strip.

There was no other place where she could go. She could not go alone,
in the dark, down the mountain to any of the lower ranches. She would
get lost. A man would not try that either, unless forced to it. A man
would rather spend the night under a tree than fight through miles of
underbrush in the night. And she could not take the old Taylorville
road down to Indian Valley, either. It was too far and too dark, and a
slight change of the wind would send the fire sweeping in that
direction. She might get trapped. And none of these impossibilities
took into account the prowling wild animals that are at the best
untrustworthy in the dark.

She would have to stay. And he would have to stay, and there did not
seem to Jack to be any use in making a disagreeable matter still more
disagreeable by sulking. He discovered that he was hungry. He
supposed, now he came to think of it, that Marion Rose would be
hungry, too. The protective instinct stirred once more within him and
pushed back his anger. So he turned and went back to the little
station.

Marion had lighted the little lamp, and she was cooking supper over
the oil stove. She had found where he stored his supplies in a
tightly built box under a small ledge, and she had helped herself. She
had two plates and two cups set out upon his makeshift table, and
while he stopped in the door she turned from the stove and began
cutting slices of bread off one of the loaves which Hank had brought
that day. With her head bent toward the lamp, her hair shown like pale
gold. Her face looked very serious--a bit sad, too, Jack thought;
though he could not see where she had any reason to